This project provides fast Python implementation of several KNN (K-Nearest Neighbors) similarity algorithms using sparse matrices, useful in Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems and others.

The package also include some normalization functions that could be useful in the pre-processing phase before the similarity computation.

Base similarity models:

• Dot Product
• Cosine
• Asymmetric Cosine
• Jaccard
• Dice
• Tversky

Graph-based similarity models:

• P3α
• RP3β

Advanced similarity model:

• S-Plus

Similarities Documentation

All models have multi-threaded routines, using Cython and OpenMP to fit the models in parallel among all available CPU cores.

The package contains normalization functions like: l1, l2, max, tf-idf, bm25, bm25+.

All the functions are compiled at low-level and could operate in-place, on csr-matrixes, if you need to save memory.

For tf-idf, bm25, bm25+ you could chose the log-base and how the term-frequency (TF) and the inverse document frequency (IDF) are computed.

To install:

pip install similaripy

Basic usage:

import similaripy as sim
import scipy.sparse as sps

# create a random user-rating matrix (URM)
urm = sps.random(1000, 2000, density=0.025)

# normalize matrix with bm25
urm = sim.normalization.bm25(urm)

# train the model with 50 knn per item 
model = sim.cosine(urm.T, k=50)

# recommend 100 items to users 1, 14 and 8 filtering the items already seen by each users
user_recommendations = sim.dot_product(urm, model.T, k=100, target_rows=[1,14,8], filter_cols=urm)

NOTE: In order to compile the Cython code it is required a GCC compiler with OpenMP (on OSX it can be installed with homebrew: brew install gcc).

This library has been tested with Python 3.6 on Ubuntu, OSX and Windows.

(Note: on Windows there are problem with flag format_output='csr', just let it equals to the default value 'coo')

I recommend configuring SciPy/Numpy to use Intel's MKL matrix libraries. The easiest way of doing this is by installing the Anaconda Python distribution.

I plan to release in the next future some utilities:

• Utilities for sparse matrices
• New similarity functions ( good ideas are welcome :) )

The idea of build this library comes from the RecSys Challenge 2018 organized by Spotify.

My team, the Creamy Fireflies, had problem in compute very huge similarity models in a reasonable time (66 million of interactions in the user-rating matrix) and using python and numpy were not suitable since a full day was required to compute one single model.

As a member of the the team I spent a lot of hours to develop these high-performance similarities in Cython to overcome the problem. At the end of the competition, pushed by my team friends, I decide to release my work to help people that one day will encounter our same problem.

Thanks to my Creamy Fireflies friends for support me.

Released under the MIT License

Citation information:

@misc{boglio_simone_similaripy,
  author       = {Boglio Simone},
  title        = {bogliosimone/similaripy},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.2583851},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2583851}
}